Year: 2013

A major improvement from SCOM 2007 to SCOM 2012 was the federation of the Root Management Server role. To preserve backwards compatibility the Microsoft.SystemCenter.RootManagementServer class still exists. By default the first management server in a Management Group gets the role of RMS Emulator, which you can move. But this is a static role. It won’t…

With the release of System Center Service Manager (SCSM) 2012 SP1 a SCOM agent was added to the SCSM management servers. This is a very welcomed addition as many management packs do not support agentless monitoring, leaving the SCSM management servers poorly monitored. However, there is a risk added. In the Microsoft.SystemCenter.2007 Management Pack (Friendly…

With Windows Vista/2008 the “Crimson” event API’s were added. The idea was to allow events to be searchable/parse-able beyond treating the event description as a big block of text. This was already addressed in a MOM Team blog post back in 2008: http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2008/02/01/authoring-event-rules-in-opsmgr.aspx Here we are introduced to what SCOM calls event parameters, which are…

I really hate to reinvent the wheel. I have had the need to create monitors for values that are already discovered as object properties. For example: the owner of a SQL database, the DHCP settings of a network adapter, or the log file directory of a web site. The first option that I though of…

The most recent release of the DNS management pack for SCOM is a total re-write of the management pack. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=37141 During the design, development, and testing process we worked with the Windows DNS feature team, the System Center team, MVP’s, and perhaps most importantly real System Admins running real world DNS servers in production environments. …

NOTE: I believe the IIS 6 Management Pack exhibits similar behaviors. In the interest of simplicity I am going to confine my comments to the IIS 7 Management Pack, but you should easily be able to extend the concepts if you need to. One frequent complaint about the IIS management pack for SCOM is that…

Disclaimer: I have only tested this in SCOM 2012, but it should be possible to work in SCOM 2007 R2 with some alteration of the PowerShell syntax. Sometimes there is a need for different agents in the same management group to have different default action accounts. This can especially be true when agents are in…

In almost every SCOM environment I have been involved with the need to monitor certificates has come up. This is the standard management pack I use. Requirements: Powershell – The management pack works on Windows 2003, but it does need powershell to be present on all agent computers. Agent Proxying – To prevent an alert storm…

One of the most common requests I get is to write a monitor that raises if a given event happens repeatedly in a window of time. Raising the alert is quite simple, but I’ve always been dissatisfied with the options for resolving the alert. Your choices are: Event Reset, which works well if your service…

If you have ever tried to create a Syslog collection rule in the SCOM Authoring Console, this is the module sequence that it creates this: This technically works, but your SYSLOG events are not very searchable. The Logging Computer shows up as blank, the Event ID is always zero, and the Rendered Description is blank. …